Out of Insight, Out of Mind

In the last post, we discussed a variety of topics related to modeling Seal of Insight. Now it’s time to put that modeling discussion to work.

The Model

I decided to stick with the conclusion I came to in my last post. I’m modeling SoI with a backwards-facing method, in which each SoI proc reduces the damage done by the previous attack. This limits the scope of SoI to one attack in the past and creates incidental overheal whenever that attack was a dodge or parry. I’m also not applying any sort of overheal function to simulate indirect overhealing, so every Seal of Insight proc acts at full strength.

This will over-represent Seal of Insight’s usefulness in overall damage mitigation (i.e. TDR), because in many cases it will compete with HoTs and other low-throughput healing effects and cause a significant amount of overhealing. However, it will more accurately represent the behavior during high-throughput periods (i.e. spikes), where that healing is far less likely to be wasted. Since we’re mostly looking at the top two or three levels of spike damage in these simulations anyway, it makes more sense to bias the results towards accuracy in that region.

I’ll also note that I’ve implemented the 5.3 nerf to Shield of the Righteous, so it’s base mitigation is already 25% in these simulations.

For completeness, and for any newcomers to this blog, here’s a quick overview of how the simulation works:

To better understand the data below, here’s a rough overview of how it’s generated: I run a Monte-Carlo sim that simulates 10k minutes of combat (think Simcraft, but paladin-specific and more limited in scope), making all combat rolls and logging all damage events. I take the resulting string of attacks (something like “1, 0, 0.7, 1, 0, 0, …” where 0 is an avoid (no damage), 1 is a full hit, 0.7 is a block, and so on) and do some calculations on it. I calculate the average damage intake normalized to 100% possible throughput (i.e. “1, 1, 1, 1, 1, …”), and report that in the “mean” row, representing mean damage intake (lower is better, represents better TDR). “std” is just the standard deviation of that mean as averaged over 5 attacks. “S%” is SotR uptime.

The rest of the rows are smoothing data for strings of N attacks. For now, let’s just consider the first gear column (C/Ha). I take the damage event sequence and perform a moving average on it (i.e. an N-attack moving average). I then calculate how many of those N-attack averages exceed a certain percentage of the player’s health. So for example, if we look at a 3-attack moving average, the “70%” row tells me how many of those 3-attack averages exceed 70% of the player’s health. Note that the categories are cumulative, so if 5% of attacks exceed 90% health, those attacks are also being counted in the 80% and 70% rows (thus, if 17% of attacks exceed 80% health, the percentage between 80% and 90% is 17%-5%=12%). I should add that the repeatability on these simulations is quite good thanks to the long integration time – results usually fluctuate by less than +/- 0.1% (absolute, i.e. 5% +/- 0.1%).

I do this for a bunch of different gear sets, i.e. “C/Ha” for Control/Haste, etc. The gear list tables provide the stats of each gear configuration so you get a rough idea of what they look like. They’re roughly equivalent to stats in ilvl 522 gear.

I haven’t updated these for 5.3, mostly because I haven’t had time. In all likelihood, nothing changes by bumping the ilvl slightly anyway. First, let’s look at the data for a 10-man normal mode boss that hits for 150k per swing after mitigation:

This seems like a pretty clear win for Control/Haste. You may have been expecting Control/Mastery to pull ahead thanks to the SotR nerf, and if we were ignoring Seal of Insight it does. In fact, without SoI active, Control/Mastery is very competitive across the board.

But Seal of Insight procs push haste significantly ahead. Remember that each Seal of Insight proc is healing for about 20% of a boss attack, so as long as the previous attack wasn’t avoided each proc acts like a miniature block. And we get more procs than we do boss attacks, statistically speaking, so we basically have about one 20% block ready for each potential melee attack. That’s a huge value.

As I noted in the last post, this gives Control/Haste a strong passive mitigation component via Seal of Insight, which is what it lacked in previous simulations. That’s the main reason that Control/Mastery was able to compete in the higher-number-of-attacks categories before. But here we see Control/Haste taking that spot.

I should add, however, that Control/Stamina still reigns supreme for raw survivability. We still get more survivability by converting Haste gems to Stamina gems, even at this low attack size threshold. The reason I call this category for Control/Haste is that even a 7-attack string doesn’t exceed 80% of the player’s health, so that extra stamina isn’t really necessary. Note, however, that this assumes a tank with 755k health raid-buffed, and many 10-man tanks are running less than that. But I still think Control/Haste wins the day for normal-mode 10-man content.

Again, Control/Stamina and Control/Haste lead the pack by a good margin. Not much else has changed from the 150k swing data; avoidance sets still perform poorly and none of the other secondary stats seem capable of coming close to haste. The loss going from haste to mastery is significant enough now that we’re not even seeing any advantage from the Control/HasteMastery set. That said, we’ve seen in the past that the results can fluctuate with small haste changes, so it’s something we’ll have to investigate in more detail in the future.

No surprises here, as the haste sets continue to dominate. The other control sets still lag the haste sets, and the avoidance sets continue to trail even further in the distance. There’s no question that, going into 5.3, you’re going to want to focus your item upgrades on your haste/mastery/hit/expertise gear rather than any gear with dodge or parry on it.

Stamina Panel

Next, I have a few sets here to compare Stamina trades. We’ve already seen that Stamina is better than haste in gem slots by a slim margin, but this panel includes trinket trades (C/St) and a high-stamina gear set that splits the remaining itemization between mastery and haste. Here are the stats of the gear sets:

There’s not a lot to say about this data, we’re really seeing more of the same. Stamina is better than haste on gems, and a lot better than haste on trinkets. Dual stamina trinkets should probably be a given for most tanks unless they’re already exceeding their stamina goals with full haste gemming. The haste/mastery combination set still looks lackluster, and of course Control/Mastery trails everything else since it’s got much lower haste.

Hit/Exp Panel

A question that came up in one of my discussions on mmo-champion was whether it was still worthwhile to cap hit and expertise. I had been testing a “pure haste” set that funneled most of that hit and expertise into haste, and it wasn’t really performing well. But I hadn’t done a breakdown at the various expertise caps that are relevant. This panel addresses those concerns.

We start with Control/Haste, and then drop back to a set that caps hit but only “soft-caps” expertise (thus 7.5% hit, 7.5% expertise), which we’ll call “Haste/hitexp” or “Ha/he” for short. The itemization we freed up gets put into haste, obviously. The next set drops to 500 expertise rating to simulate avoiding expertise entirely, but with some residual left on gear. That set has 7.5% hit and 1.47% expertise, so we’ll ca” it “Haste/hit” or “Ha/h” for short. Finally, we have the “pure haste” set that drops all but 500 hit rating and 500 expertise rating but ramps our haste up to 18650 (about 43.8% melee haste).

This data is pretty straightforward. Control/Haste leads the soft-capped set Ha/he, and dropping more expertise or hit only makes things worse. There’s two reasons for this. First is the obvious one, the under-capped sets have lower holy power generation, as evidenced by the SotR uptime percentage (S%). Trading the expertise doesn’t incur a very large loss, as haste is actually pretty competitive with expertise for raw HPG. Dropping the hit obviously hurts a lot more.

More importantly though, consider that SoI proc triggers are Crusader Strike, Shield of the Righteous, and auto-attacks. All three of those get the full benefit from expertise, and an attack that doesn’t hit can’t proc Seal of Insight. So despite breaking even in terms of overall HPG, dropping 7.5% (or 15%) expertise for 6% (or 12%) more haste is a net loss because you get fewer Seal of Insight procs. So there doesn’t seem to be any advantage to dropping expertise hard-cap for more haste in terms of survivability.

I will note, however, that if you turn off SoI procs entirely, the C/Ha, Ha/he, and Ha/h sets are all about even. At normal Vengeance levels, Ha/he should end up doing slightly more DPS than C/Ha because haste is a better DPS stat than expertise above the 7.5% dodge “soft-cap.” So this is another case where you may consider making a survivability-for-DPS trade if you’re hitting a rough enrage timer.

There’s really nothing different about the 250k or 350k data, so I’ll provide them here without further commentary:

There’s a lot of data in this post, but the conclusions are pretty straightforward. We’ve been ignoring Seal of Insight for a long time based on a hand-wavy overheal argument, and this data clearly shows that we weren’t getting the whole picture. We knew haste was good, of course – the old model got that much correct, at least – but led us to incorrect conclusions about how haste compared with its nearest competitor, mastery.

The old model would have told us that the recent nerf to SotR’s base mitigation dropped haste behind mastery in terms of survivability value, primarily due to the strong passive mitigation value of blocking. But Seal of Insight gives us a competing effect that, quite frankly, blows blocking out of the water. We get more than one Seal of Insight proc per boss attack – in fact, with the C/Ha set we get approximately 1.3 procs per boss attack – and each one of those procs gives us a guaranteed 20% “mini-block” on damage already taken. Combine that with a more favorable rating-to-percent conversion for haste than mastery, and haste looks like the better passive mitigation stat.

In short, Seal of Insight tips the scales solidly in favor of the Control/Haste gearing paradigm. The only argument you could make for Control/Mastery is that it doesn’t rely on the player operating a strong rotation. But it does still require that the player times Shield of the Righteous well, which may not be a compatible assumption. A player that can’t maintain a rotation is probably less likely to be precise with their Active Mitigation too, which pulls the entire claim that Control/Mastery excels at passive mitigation into question. It’s still got the “no skill required” benefit of blocking, but Seal of Insight procs from auto-attacks don’t require any player interaction either.

In fact, I’d have to argue at this point that there’s very little reason to pursue a Control/Mastery gearing paradigm at all. Stamina is still the king survivability stat, and it’s truly passive. A strong player will still want to gear for as much haste as they can while maintaining a comfortable level of stamina. A weak player would be better-off stam-stacking and taking whatever stats they get on gear. A truly abysmal player may just use traditional tanking gear, which will give them high stamina and lots of passive survivability via avoidance and blocking. I’m not sure that any level of player would find a mastery build optimal outside of special cases (the standard “Heroic Sha” disclaimer).

Some players have suggested that maybe it would be beneficial to drop expertise for haste, but the data solidly refutes that hypothesis. The data confirms that it’s still a priority to maintain hit (7.5%) and expertise (15%) caps before piling on the haste. Nowadays, that should be easy to do with reforges alone, possibly with a few expertise/stamina or expertise/haste gems to dance around the cap more effectively.

So, the TLDR summary:

Stamina is still your best survivability stat, haste is a reasonably close second, mastery a distant third, dodge and parry tied for an even more distant fourth.

Capping hit (7.5%) and expertise (15%) are still your most important secondary stat goals (i.e. Control comes before Haste). It’s not clear from the data whether stamina is better or worse than hit and expertise – my guess is that stamina is better, but it should rarely come up in practice since you can’t reforge into stamina anyway.

Control/Haste should be the default gearing strategy for pretty much everyone nowadays, augmented by as much stamina as you need to feel comfortable in the encounter. Rule of thumb: if you keep going splat, pick up some more stamina.

22 Responses to Out of Insight, Out of Mind

It is interesting how close haste is to stamina at gem trading ratios, even for 350K swings. I suspect that this understates the advantage slightly–both for reasons that have been discussed before, and because I suspect that the choice to ignore over-healing probably overrates haste. This is not a criticism; I accept the rationale for doing so. It is simply that any model of SoI is going to introduce some distortions. The take home message, though, is that the survivability to dps tradeoff of gem swapping from stamina to haste looks hard to resist at any content level.

Yeah, I’d have to agree. I do feel like the higher boss damage sizes (and thus lower normalized health values) tend to obscure the differences by making the advantage look smaller than it is, but I haven’t worked out the math to confirm it. Roughly speaking, you’re comparing $X/H$ to $X/H+(\Delta X – 0.08 X)/1.08$, where $X$ is the size of a damage spike, $H$ is the normalized health of C/Ha, and $\Delta X$ is the change in spike magnitude you get by changing to C/Sg. 1.08 is to represent the fact that you gain about 8% health in C/Sg.

Thanks for another great post. I love the data. You said that in this post you had a lot in it, but if people are accustomed to reading your content they know that you still have well written summaries at the end of a each section and a great TLDR at the end.

So, in an effort to make haste slightly less attractive and Mastery/Mitigation slightly more attractive… we essentially see Haste blowing the other tanking stats out of the water entirely? I’m glad I can queue into LFR as a tank and still gather up Ret gear, then. Should make my attempts at getting Haste gear a bit easier.

Well, to be fair, they did make haste less attractive than it was before the SotR nerf. It’s just that we weren’t considering Seal of Insight before, and we are now. If you compare the data pre- and post-nerf on equal footing (i.e. both with SoI or both without SoI), you would definitely see the reduction in haste’s value.

It’ll be interesting to see Blizzard’s reaction to this. It’s somewhat funny how they nerfed our mastery when it’s not even the biggest contributor to our spike reduction. Perhaps doing a preemptive analysis of GC without any CS or HotR interaction might give them more data to make better decisions for 5.4? I have a feeling they’ll nerf SoI and maybe SS a bit since they’ve mentioned they can’t really do much to SoB without people going OMGWTFBBQ.

I had a very concrete real-world reinforcement of this the other week. I derped out & had Seal of Truth on for the first few pulls of my raid’s second night on H-Iron Qon 10.

We went from P3/P4 reasonably consistently, to struggling to get out of P1. The difference SoI made on my health was extremely visceral. It’s good to have fights where you can really feel the modelling & the practical experience going hand-in-hand.

It’s pretty worthwhile to glance at the healing meters every once in a while. The sheer amount of healing a haste build prot paladin puts out is pretty insane.

I had the bright idea last week of squeezing out some extra DPS by trying Seal of Truth since ‘we have plenty of healing’. Turns out, we didn’t have plenty of healing if I wasn’t running Seal of Insight. =P

I was wondering if there are any concerns with having the SoI reduce the last attack in a string pushing the string out of a dangerous spike category?

The reason I ask because I thought of the case where the 3rd attack would overkill by 10% but that attack is then reduced by 20% leaving the throughput of the attack string at 90%. Practically that SoI proc would not have happened, and why I think I would prefer SoI proc’s to affect the next bass attack. I can mentally resolve the heal as a boost to the hp pool, therefore reducing the impact of the next boss swing on the hp pool.

Statistically speaking, it doesn’t matter whether we apply forwards or backwards. The situation you describe has a complementary forward-facing equivalent – namely an avoid followed by an SoI proc followed by three hits. In reality, that proc probably occurred when you were at full health, yet in the forward-facing model it reduces the 3-attack string from 110% of health to 90% of health.

It isn’t until you start considering SotR and dynamic finisher queues that the difference becomes significant, and there it makes more sense to use a backward-facing model. I discussed the differences pretty thoroughly in the previous blog post (linked in the beginning of this one) – I suggest you read that if you want further commentary.

I’m still playing with them myself to decide what works best. I hope to have some updated suggestions soon; for now the current Control/Haste ones work well enough. I’m likely to drop Mastery back to 0.7-0.75 and avoidance down to ~0.35ish.

Yeah, I’ve been battling with the hit/exp/haste issue as well. It mostly comes up with ordered rankings of gear in slots though, as it tends to favor high hit/exp items (when really, we’d want to value haste items). May try using haste>hit>exp instead of hit>exp>haste.

Theck, I’ve only recently started reading your blog, though I’ve read about all of your amazing work for quite a long time. I really enjoy reading the detailed analysis that you provide with data to back everything up. I just started playing Pandaria about 2 weeks ago after quitting in Nov so I’m dealing with the “gearing up” grind. With all of the work you’ve done, I still have yet to see a great discussion or post anywhere out there concerning when it’s appropriate to take the tier bonuses.

Example: I’m currently in possession of LFR tier shoulder pieces, but after looking around it seems that the Ret shoulder pieces are much better for the purpose of becoming a haste tank. At what point do I need to ignore gearing for a ton of haste, and pick up tier bonuses, or should they be ignored completely?

If you had any spare time in your busy schedule to write up a post explaining the appropriate times to sacrifice haste from Ret gear to obtain Prot tier bonuses, I think that would help a large amount of people that are in the “just getting back into it” phase of Paladin tanking.

Any thoughts/insight is appreciated and your hard work is most definitely appreciated.

Getting the set bonuses will depend on the specific bonus. T14 2p isn’t worth trading away haste for unless you absolutely need Ardent Defender every 2 minutes for a certain fight. Unless you’re progressing through a fight, you almost certainly won’t. The T14 4p might be worth getting, and if you have the choice of which items to use then the legguards are the weakest piece since they’re dodge/mastery while all the other pieces at least have hit or expertise. However, all of the tier slots have an expertise/hit+haste or a mastery+haste option so if you find you’re getting more of the haste items than the tier pieces, keep up with the haste because you’ll do fine with them.

The 4p for T15 is an oddball since it is difficult to model. If you’re religious about using DP during high damage phases then it could work out for you. The trouble with the bonus is it’s extra Holy Power, which means haste can compete directly with it.

The non set hands, helm, leg, and shoulders all have either expertise/hit+haste or mastery+haste pieces (wowhead.com has the lists), so you could get haste in all the tier slots and do pretty well instead of getting the 4p bonus. The chest slot has fewer options, but the T15 ret chestpiece is expertise+haste so it’s not a problem.

In short, you could probably entirely ignore the set bonuses for haste and do fine. Just make sure you’ve got a tight rotation and are using SS as needed and you’re good to go.

It really depends. I loved both of the T14 bonuses, and used them. There are people who like the T15 4-piece, I’m sort of mixed. It’s in the simulation, so I do plan on trying to publish some data for that eventually. Maybe as early as next week? So far I haven’t really bothered with it, because we have access to some fairly good off-set options pretty early. Heroic Horridon legs, for example, vs. heroic tier (we did Horridon a month before Ji-Kun).

If you’re gearing up, take what you can get, and don’t worry so much about the tier bonuses.

what are your thoughts on them wanting to cap vengeance in 5.4 in terms of tank DPS? I don’t think it would affect tank survivability, but it might limit the usefulness of gearing for haste?

Along the same lines, what would you think of a tank gemming http://www.wowhead.com/item=95346 (Capacitive Primal Diamond) instead of our tanking legendary meta? Assuming a tank currently has no problems staying alive, is the boost in dps worth it over the damage mitigation?

I’m not really concerned about the caps, insofar as they should be high enough that you don’t run into them under normal circumstances. The 10-man cap seems a little low and may cause such issues, the 25-man isn’t going to have much effect.

I use the Capacitive diamond – it’s a ~10% DPS increase, which is pretty huge. The tank one is good too, it’s just hard to give up that sizable of a DPS increase. Tank version may need a buff to keep it competitive.